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Kent Brewster, the lead developer for the mobile version of Netflix for iPhone from 2009-2010 presented at a panel during this week's SXSW conference in Austin, Texas. The topic of his presentation was "Mistakes I Made Developing Netflix for the iPhone," and it covered the design and development errors he made during his time at Netflix and what he learned from them. But he also revealed a nifty little tidbit at the end of his talk, too: he told the audience how to peek at the Netflix for iPhone app's source code.

Convore, the real-time, Web-based group message system, just went live in the iTunes App Store. Previously, Convore was available only as a Web-based messaging service and this was one of the things that set it apart - though perhaps not in a good way.

"Basically, it's a contemporary version of IRC," said co-founder Leah Culver, when last we looked at the service. Now, the service has hit iOS and taken this new form of IRC on the road. Will an app change anything? Or does this just mean that all of you Convore addicts (and it seems like there are quite a few already) can get your fix from wherever you are?

Twitter has just released a fairly substantial update to its iOS applications. There are some nice new features here: a cleaner interface for composing your Tweets, an easier tool for uploading photos, auto-shortening for links (to the official t.co shortener), and autocomplete for usernames and hashtags.

It also appears to include a fix to one of the things I found most irritating with the older version of the iPhone app: that old, read Direct Messages perennially appeared as unread.

But there's an addition to the app that Twitter describes as "very cool" that I find much less so. It's a Quick Bar, and it appears at the top of your timeline. The Quick Bar highlights what's currently trending on Twitter, and you can swipe the bar in order to see additional topics.

Yobongo, the iPhone app that "makes it super fun and easy to chat with people nearby," has finally gone live in the iTunes App Store. After a month in beta testing, Yobongo has shown itself to be a well-designed, functional mobile chat room.

Now, just one thing remains to be seen - can it deliver on its promise of "ambient real-time communication"?

Chomp for Android is a new release from Chomp, a company's whose search engine for iPhone apps launched last year. Available as both an online search engine and downloadable application, Chomp offers an attractive user interface for finding new Android applications which improves on the official Android Market application in many ways.

Unfortunately, where the service's search algorithm breaks down is in one of the most important aspects: the nature of what it indexes and how it ranks its results. This is why a search for "fitness" yields dozens of results but a search for "navigation" returns nothing.

At this week's Game Developer Conference in San Francisco, Unity Technologies made its Unity Android software commercially available to developers who want to port their existing iOS titles to the Android platform. According to the company, the process of porting a game from iOS to Android can be as simple as changing the target platform and clicking "Build."

Evernote is releasing a completely redesigned app for iPhone and iPod Touch today (iTunes link). Noting that its iPhone app was first released the same day as Apple launched the iTunes App Store, Evernote says it's learned a lot about what it takes to make a great app. And equipped with two years worth of feedback, the notetaking and storage platform says it's gone "back to the drawing board and reconsidered every single aspect of Evernote for iPhone.

The changes are pretty impressive, and if you're reliant on Evernote for your mobile device you'll find the app faster and the interface more intuitive - all making the app a lot easier for not just note-taking but for note retrieval.

Say what you want about the Dummies brand, but when you're brand-spanking-new to a task, topic, software program or anything else, those simplified, easy-to-read books and online tutorials are a good way to start getting your feet wet.

With that in mind, when we stumbled across this "iPhone Application Development for Dummies" cheat sheet posted on Dummies.com, it seemed like it was worth a quick share.

Instagram, the iOS photo sharing app, launched last fall and quickly rose to the status of iPhone app darling, hitting the 1 million user landmark in a mere 10 weeks. Why? Instagram is a beautiful, well-designed app that just works. In creating the app, Instagram passed over one thing that most companies consider a standard requirement - a website.

Recently, the company released an API for developers to expand on this minimal app and one developer has done just that with Gramfeed - a (nearly) fully-functioning Web version of Instagram.

In 2011, we launched a new series where we round up some of our favorite new apps for smartphones (primarily iPhone and Android) on a monthly basis. With February now coming to a close, we've listed some of the new apps that caught our eye this month below. This month's list includes both those that are available now and those we're eagerly anticipating.